She lived to tell the tale in a book called "Disposable People? The Plight of Refugees" (Orbis, $24). During her remarkable life, this 60-year-old former nun has been everything from a college professor and Emmy-winning television producer to an advocate for the displaced. Nothing tested her like a freak accident four years ago in the southern Sudan.

These days it takes Mayotte a long time to come to the door. She lives in an apartment on Mercer Island, a lush lake community across the Interstate Highway 90 bridge from Seattle.

"This gray-haired old lady with one leg can't go into war zones anymore, so I came to Seattle," she says with a laugh.

Mayotte's blue eyes flash determination. Her green suit, like her right leg, ends just below the knee. She moves with the aid of a walker past a bronze sculpture of an African family in chaos. It is a gift from Refugees International. A picture book of Sarajevo sits on her coffee table. Mayotte settles into a comfortable white couch by the windows.

This is her way of acknowledging that the Sudanese accident cost more than her right leg. It also ended years of flying into the world's hot spots. No more can Mayotte live in huts like the local people and stroll with them over the hard ground. As she had many times before, Mayotte cut her losses and moved on. This year she landed at Seattle University, where she teaches African history and "modern civilization through a refugee's lens."

She cruises Mercer Island in a van with electronic controls and a retractable ramp for her wheelchair. Mayotte talks easily about the accident. She doesn't have to supply details, because a Public Broadcasting System film crew captured it for "Visionaries," a series that describes her as "one of the most extraordinary people in the world today." She rolls the videotape, fast-forwarding to the lovely day of the accident. You see her stepping out of a tiny plane onto a grassy flatland. Smiling into the sun, she looks happy and fit in a blue blouse and flowered skirt.

"Look!" she says. "That's the last time I ever walked on two legs." She sighs. "That was my favorite skirt. It was so beautiful."

Mayotte had flown into the Sudan to draw attention to famine victims. She says that since 1983, at least 1.5 million people have died there because food and medical aid have been withheld. Burial has been difficult, because of civil warfare and the stigma attached to starvation. So Mayotte, the film crew, some soldiers and relief workers waited in a field littered with human skulls and bones. On the videotape, a cargo plane circles the field twice, preparing to make a food drop. Missing its target, it drops 200-pound sacks of grain over the heads of the observers.

"We ran for our lives as fast as we could," Mayotte says. "I remember that so clearly."

The camera wobbles at this point in the videotape. Everybody scrambles for safety. The plane roars overhead. Grain sacks slam the ground. Then somebody shouts. The camera finds Mayotte lying among skulls and femurs. She's bleeding into the tall grass. A wayward sack, dropping at an estimated 120 miles per hour, crushed her right leg.

"I was so lucky," she says, although no one else was injured. "That morning a doctor had gotten onto the plane by accident. She said, `Do you have room? I want to see the feeding area.' If she hadn't been there, I would have died.

"The soldiers carried me across the field. I remember the commander saying, `Slowly, slowly, slowly,' as they put me on the plane. They were so gentle with me. They took off their rifles to help me aboard."

Mayotte nearly bled to death aboard the plane. After a long convalescence in the U.S., she bounced back. She has always bounced back. This is a woman who survived a "dysfunctional" childhood in Wichita and a three-year bout with polio at age 18. She entered a convent against the wishes of a domineering father, who hated Catholics. As a nun, she taught in schools from Los Angeles to Chicago.

"It was just like the army," she says. "You went where you were sent."

Feeling restless, she left the convent after Vatican II with $51 to her name. "It was just time. Lots of us felt that."